Monday, June 09, 2008

Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitness is a fascinating book, which argues that the best way to read the Gospels as history is to see them as eyewitness testimony.

In order to establish this point, Bauckham seeks to argue against the popular scholarly belief that the Gospels, as we now have them, was a product of a long process of anonymous transmission by the early church communities, which usually results in the notion of ditching the original testimonies of Jesus and replacing them with their own views of Jesus. Instead of this, Bauckham seeks to ground the writing of Gospels with the testimonies of eyewitnesses therefore bringing it more closely to the form in which the eyewitnesses told their stories about Jesus.

I thought this was a great book and I am sure I will be referring to it for years to come.